130 Years of Abstinence: An Excerpt from In Darkness
by Osheen Nevoy
Summary: In 1970 Gerard Stiles is brought back to life by Judah Zachary's spell. To save himself and prevent the destruction of Collinwood, Gerard travels back to 1840. There he finds that the life of a time-traveling former ghost includes practical considerations, such as one brought to the fore by an encounter with his old friend Leticia Faye.


130 Years of Abstinence

An Excerpt from _In Darkness_ , a Gerard Stiles Fanfiction

Author's Note:

This vignette more-or-less began as a "Plot, what plot?" It quickly developed more plot as I watched more of the 1840 episodes and re-acquainted myself with the context and the characters. I'm presenting it here as a teaser for a longer work-in-progress starring Gerard Stiles, _In Darkness_. In that novel, Gerard himself (not Judah Zachary in the form of Gerard) is successfully brought back to life by the spell Daphne and the children perform in Episodes 1099 and 1100. The now-living Gerard and our heroes fail to stop the destruction of Collinwood, and Gerard is sent back in time to 1840 to try and undo the doom he set in motion when he fell under Judah Zachary's control.

This sequence takes place almost immediately after Gerard's arrival in 1840, and concerns his first encounter with his erstwhile partner, singer and mentalist Leticia Faye. It also concerns one of practical results of being suddenly alive again after more than a century of ghostliness. 

* * *

"Leticia." He seized her by her upper arms and stared at her. He wanted to devour her with his eyes, his mouth, his everything. She looked to him like the most perfect flower. And he was a bee who was desperate to suck her nectar.

A bee who hadn't sucked any nectar for 130 years.

"Leticia," he repeated hoarsely. "I have never seen anything more beautiful." He plunged down on her. His mouth plundered hers as hard and as fast as though he intended to eat her up then and there.

The flower was clearly a great deal less eager than the bee. At first she responded to his kiss. But in the instant he slowed his assault, she broke loose from him with a look of absolute fury.

Leticia Faye hissed at him, "Have you gone out of your mind?"

That told him more than he had known before, at least. Whatever point he had returned to in the midst of his shoddy story, it was a time by which their partnership had already dissolved.

 _Now to see if I can get her to take me to bed anyway._

"Yes," he answered her. " _You_ drive me out of my mind. I want you. I need you. I need you more than I've needed any other woman in my life."

She replied with a bitter laugh. "Do you really! Do you need me more than you needed Mrs. Collins when you married her last week?"

More information there. Little by little he was going to glean the whole of the story.

"Yes," he growled again. "Nothing with Samantha ever came close to this."

Leticia's grin was more of snarl. "Oh, you are funny, love. You really are a laugh. A few days ago you and Samantha are floating through love's young dream and you can't be bothered to give me the time of day. Now Mrs. Collins gives you the heave-ho, and suddenly I'm the most beautiful sight you've seen."

 _None of that matters, Leticia!_ he wanted to tell her. _None of it matters except that I'm desperate for some amorous congress because in a few days' time I'm going to lose my life again to a hideous undead disembodied warlock's head._

 _They do say honesty is the best policy,_ he mused. He suddenly wondered how Leticia would reply if he said all of that to her.

With her head flung back and her hands planted on her hips, she demanded, "And what, precisely, are you grinning at?"

"I am only admiring you, my dearest. I married Samantha for her money. I thought you understood that. I thought you knew that the money would have been yours as well as mine."

"Would it really. Partners forever, eh? I'm touched. Well, now you have nothing, _partner_. Just the same as I have."

"In that case," he said, grabbing her arms again and pulling her to him, "then for God's sake let us go to bed, since we have nothing else."

He held her an inch or so away from him and made no attempt to kiss her. He had the strong suspicion that with much more contact with her now, he might just spend himself standing right there in the hallway. He willed his body back under some control while she stood staring puzzledly up at him.

"I can't make head nor tail of you, love. Are you really this randy because of Quentin Collins interrupting your little honeymoon?"

"No," he said. "I am really this randy because I have not bedded anyone for the past 130 years."

Her eyes, understandably, went wide. "You haven't bedded anyone for 130 what?"

"Never mind," he told her, grinning at the look on her face. "Are you coming to bed with me or aren't you?"

Leticia pulled her arms away from him. Ostentatiously she fluffed out the tiers of lace he had crushed on her sleeves. "What will you do if I tell you I am not?"

With a little bow to her he answered, "Then I will wish you a very good day, Miss Faye, and I will go to pay another afternoon call."

"Will you just," she mocked. "And on whom, pray tell, will you be calling?"

"On Mrs. Edith Collins. She made it clear to me on multiple occasions that my attentions would always be welcome to her."

"You really are a one, aren't you." She narrowed her eyes and shook her head. "I ought to let you try her. I'll enjoy seeing you crawl back to me when she's spurned you because she won't soil herself with Samantha Collins' leavings."

"If you believe that will happen, my dear, by all means let us try it and see."

Her jealousy tipped the scales when nothing else would. She reached up, grabbed hold of his hair and pulled him down to her. "Come here to me, you bastard."

Their kiss was brief and frenzied. Gerard broke away from it, cupped her face between his hands and growled, "Come upstairs to your chamber before I burst here and now."

It was hard to tell who was herding whom as they hastened toward the stairwell. He flung one arm about her shoulders and she was clutching his waist, and she giggled, "Easy, there, love! It won't help us any if we break our legs."

"I don't think even broken legs would stop me."

Up the stairs they went. Gerard brought his hand down lower and squeezed her breasts hard while they climbed. "Have you lost faith in the power of your charms, Leticia? Why should you doubt the strength of my desire for you?"

"Oh, Lordy, no, I don't doubt that." She ground herself against him and almost undid him. "I can feel the proof of that well enough. It's everything else about you I doubt."

"Doubt whatever you like," he said, "as long as we get the hell to bed."

They reached her chamber door. Both of them fumbled for the doorknob, managed to turn it while kissing, and all-but fell inside.

Leticia locked the door behind them. Then, with her hands on her hips again, she grinned up at him. "Well, here we are, partner," she said. "What was it you wanted to do?"

He didn't answer in words. And his answer marked the end of all coherent conversation.

A quarter of an hour later they lay sweat-soaked and naked on the extremely disarranged bed. Clothes, sheets and pillows lay strewn all over the floor. As his breathing and pulse returned gradually to normal, Gerard thought, _Right, then. Now that's out of the way, I need to do some planning. Now I've got a chance of managing strategic thought, without muddling everything up from the effects of a century-plus of abstinence._

The abstinence problem was dealt with. It wouldn't be so simple to deal with his lurking, ever-present terror.

He glanced over to Leticia and noticed the expression on her face. At this sort of moment for them in the days gone by, he knew she would have been curled up looking like a particularly self-satisfied cat. This time she lay propped on one elbow against a pillow that she must have retrieved from the floor once their tempest had subsided. She was studying him with a puzzled, pondering look.

"Now, love," she said. "I'm hoping you'll tell me what that was all about."

He raised his eyebrows at her. "Wasn't it obvious?"

" _What_ we did, is obvious. _Why_ we did it, isn't." She tilted her head to one side and asked, "Did Samantha Collins really hurt you that badly?"

Her question took him by surprise. "Samantha Collins has nothing to do with this."

"Doesn't she?"

If she had surprised him the moment before, it was nothing compared to what she said next.

"You cried, Gerard."

He felt his body grow cold. At first he held her solemn gaze. Then he turned away abruptly and got out of the bed.

"What are you talking about?" he demanded.

Instead of waiting for her answer he busied himself locating the scattered pieces of his clothing. He heard the bedsprings creak as she followed him out of the bed. She walked over to stand beside him in all her naked loveliness, a fact that he studiously ignored.

"When you spent yourself, you cried," she told him quietly. "You turned away from me and I saw the tears on your face. I reached out and I touched them."

He found his underdrawers beneath one of the pillows on the floor. He threw the pillow to the bed and then put the underdrawers on, not looking at her. "It was just sweat," he said brusquely. He thought that ought to be a believable theory. He could feel his sweat now, stinging at all the scratches Leticia had bestowed on him with her fingernails.

"No, love," she said. "It wasn't. I can tell the difference between sweat and tears. Gerard, listen to me. I know you. I know you well enough to know that you don't cry. Certainly you don't cry in a moment like that. So you tell me, then. Why did you cry this time?"

He felt his expression harden into a defensive sneer. He wanted to keep on denying the things she was saying of him. But he told himself there was no point.

For his mission in this time period to succeed, he needed Leticia's help. He was going to need every scrap of help he could find, if he hoped for even the tiniest chance of victory.

And for Leticia to help him in every way she could, she needed to know the truth.

"Something's happened to you," she insisted. "I can't believe you loved Samantha Collins so much that losing her made you cry."

He noticed his trousers lying crumpled by the door and walked over to reclaim them. "You're right," he said. "I didn't love her that much. And I don't. And you're also right that something has happened to me. A hell of a lot of somethings."

He looked back toward her as he got into his trousers. She looked so God-damned beautiful that at another time in his life he would promptly have tupped her again. But not this time. This time he had to plan for his almost certainly losing battle against a long-dead warlock.

Leticia crossed the room and stood before him, as pale and perfect as a piece of Roman statuary. "Tell me what happened," she said.

Curious to see what would happen next, he challenged, "No. Why don't you use your powers and tell _me_ what's happened?"

For a moment she hesitated. Then she accepted his challenge. She reached up and touched his face. She closed her eyes and waited, with the distant, listening expression he had seen on her so many times before.

Trouble drew in on her face like an advancing storm front. She murmured, "There's death all around you. You've been in the land of death." With a sudden gasp she opened her eyes and pulled her hand away.

"What's happened to you?" Leticia whispered. "I know you're alive. But—you haven't been. You've been—something else."

He didn't answer her. Her expression changed to one of growing horror.

"No," she breathed. "Gerard, please tell me you're not the vampire."

It was too long since he had spent any time in 1840. Collinsport's current affairs of the day were exceedingly vague memories for him. "What vampire?" he asked. But he didn't really care about the answer. "It's daylight, Leticia," he pointed out. "Do vampires go out and about in the daylight?"

"Oh," she admitted, puzzled. "No, I suppose they don't. Then—then what are you?"

 _In for a penny, in for a pound,_ he thought.

Gerard Stiles took Leticia Faye's hands in his.

"I'm a former ghost who was brought to life again and then sent backward through time by a witch so I can stop a dead warlock from stealing my body and my life."


End file.
